Month: September 2021

European occult traditions often look backward in time for the keys to mystery. The ancient masters encoded secret knowledge for later discovery according to Theosophists and Hermetic magicians. Wicca merely revives the oldest religion according to Gardnerian witches. Whether one understands these claims as literal or metaphorical, they demonstrate a past-oriented attitude and aesthetic that shapes contemporary traditions and their values. The language of kings, queens, domains, and subjects enters ritual forms to frame the role of the High Priest and Priestess or the relationship between gods and humanity.

While royal imagery complements a pastoral aesthetic often associated with modern Paganism, it also calls forth class divides between a privileged elite and the common masses. The atavistic aesthetic may influence the perception of modern Paganism as exclusionary to communities of color, being rooted both in European mysticism and colonizer hierarchies. The regressive tendencies show up differently across modern Pagan traditions, but they are quite evident even in Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca. Even without emphasizing monarchial hierarchies, the cultural models typically applied to “Norse” and “Celtic” traditions still assume a stratified society, divided into warrior-druid-bard heroes and common artisans and farmers.

Framing modern Wicca as a revival of “the Old Religion” establishes a relationship to tradition usually associated with conservative politics. Conservative politics forms a contemporary cult of tradition, hewing to values of an imagined, idealized past that imposes duties of continuation on the present. A “traditional” approach to value reinforces historic injustice such as narrowly defined gender roles and resistance to gender identity and relationship styles that escape narrow confines.

Gardner identifies a focus on returning to nature as one of the essential elements of his witchcraft tradition. The values associated with this element of Gardnerian Wicca embrace a pastoral aesthetic. As an artistic movement, pastoralism frames the desire for simplicity and natural settings as a desire for a traditional life of clearly defined roles such as shepherd, wife, and king. Injunctions against the evils of technology and the modern world appear in Gardner’s writing, often alongside paeans to monarchy and a just, benevolent aristocracy.

While American Paganism contains strains of progressive politics, the duo-theist framework of the Wiccan Goddess and God expand rigid gender roles across polytheist pantheons. When any goddess is reducible to an abstract “Goddess” and every god is reducible to an abstract “God,” divine attributes are subsumed by attributes assigned as masculine and feminine. In addition to ignoring nonbinary gender identity and the transgender experience, the duo-theist framework aligns with culturally defined gender roles, the domain of tradition. In response to internal advocacy, contemporary Pagan traditions have begun to integrate more inclusive approaches to the God and Goddess of Wicca, but the oversight can be attributable to a framework internal to the tradition, not merely one shared by the broader culture.

Fortunately for the progressive, modern Paganism cannot be entirely reduced to its atavistic features. One must bring a critical lens to practice, tradition, and myth, but in so doing one begins a highly rewarding engagement with the path. Through the deconstruction of gender archetypes, political power, and social relationships, a modern Pagan can renew their tradition, affirming it as a dynamic and adaptive context rather than one merely recorded in a history book. When one establishes a coven as a peer community situated in an intersection of identities and related communities, witchcraft steps into the context of life as we live it today.

Racist tendencies that arise in conjunction with heritage-based traditions can be combated with the same critical lens. While only some lineages assert “heritage” as a gatekeeping measure, the dominant strains of “Celtic” and “Norse” Paganism alongside British Traditional Witchcraft have influenced the dominating whiteness of Pagan communities. Nevertheless, a white person investigating their heritage critically is invited to understand a “Celtic” or “Norse” identity and to recognize the very recent creation of white identity that subsumes other identities. Knowledge of pre-Christian people of Northern and Northwestern Europe remains limited because Roman expansion erased or consumed many traces of those cultures, laying the groundwork for a homogenization that Christianity would complete. In other words white people get an opportunity to recognize that imperialism took an identity from them as well, disrupting a continuity they had previously taken only from whiteness.

Pagans of non-English European heritage living in North America should investigate their ancestry to learn about the excluding and plastic nature of whiteness. To understand that French, Irish, German, and Polish people were deemed apart from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream and oppressed accordingly is to understand the auto-colonization of European peoples by whiteness. A white Pagan should learn these lessons to build empathy with disadvantaged identity groups as we find them in our current context, to recognize the privilege foisted upon them by the erasure of their ancestry, and to find common cause in remedying systemic social injustice.

Philosopher Tim van Gelder argues that metaphors for the mind reflect popular technological paradigms. During the latter 20th century, computing metaphors dominate philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Functionalist explanations of the mental states mirror the binary logic of Alan Turing’s machines. Sigmund Freud’s analysis of subconscious influence on speech and action resembles the need to relieve excess pressure in a steam engine. While technological models assist in reasoning about more abstract phenomena, the phenomenon remains logically prior to the model. One should be careful when drawing conclusions from the framing metaphor since the metaphor need not conform perfectly to serve as an explanatory device.

Modern witchcraft and New Age lore often focus on an undefined “energy” that can be gathered, directed, and released in service of operational magic. Descriptions of energy work often recall the dynamics of electric current. For instance, excess energy requires “grounding” when a ritual is complete or else the discharge may be dangerous. Beyond these phenomenological descriptions, the energy remains undefined.

In Yoga traditions control over breathing assists with directing focus and developing meditative concentration. The word for breath, “prana,” indicates both the physical breath and a more subtle current that carries vitality through the body. Traditional Chinese Medicine recognizes a similar concept designated with the word for breath, “qi.” The similarity should be unsurprising since the Silk Road connects these traditions, and they compare well with New Age “energy” due to its appropriation from those cultures. These concepts reference an observable phenomenon to anchor imagination of a subtle phenomenon.

While metaphors are useful for making the abstract concrete, conclusions cannot reliably follow from the metaphor alone. Breath and electricity behave according to observable physical principles, but one cannot infer the behavior of a more subtle “energy” from the behavior of electricity. Imagining the breath as a flow of electric current can stabilize and focus awareness, but these metaphors describe an experience using imagery. They are not sensory descriptions of a magical power.

Setting aside the metaphors, all of these models do seem to refer to the same phenomenon. During meditation one can settle into a feeling of expanded awareness where the immediate sensory environment transforms into something “inside” the mind rather than “outside” the body. The expanded awareness can be focused on specific sensations to unpack the arising, presenting, and passing of sense experience. The flow of breath or electricity can be used to describe intentional direction and focus of the expanded awareness. Chaos magicians describe reaching a state like this one when directing intention toward a sigil, training one’s awareness to the sigil and the outcome it encodes.

While one should not rely on this technique to spin straw into gold, expanded awareness is foundational for the cultivation of mindfulness in both Buddhism and Yoga. Being able to release passing tensions and focus on the task at hand can make a mundane task soothing. Gathering resolve through expanded awareness shines light on habits we want to break. The metaphors should help us achieve the state of consciousness by giving us a mental map, a technique for cultivating it. They do not need to convey metaphysical or ontological facts about the world to serve this function, so inference from the model should be limited to practical application.

John Rawls described society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.” There is a value proposition underlying the formation of an organized community and submitting to its laws. While an individual loses freedom, they receive a wealth of opportunities to cooperate with others to secure more resources than any of them could secure alone. The freedom of the individual outside of community is a meager freedom that promises no security, but community allows a person to get everything they need for themselves by participating in formal and informal support networks. Given that people are generally born into their communities rather than forsake primal independence to join, the value proposition should be understood as framing what community does for people and what people do for community.

The value proposition also provides a motivation for obeying a community’s laws. Law makes up the fabric of society, defining the rights and duties of citizens to the community, and of the community to the citizens. Knowing those duties and knowing that they will be enforced by the collective power of the community defines a space in which cooperation can take place. All individuals involved can be secure in what the law promises, and they can form cooperative agreements within the framework of law.

The benefit of law only follows when all individuals in the community follow the law. Citizens then have motivation to obey the law and abide by the consequences when they do not. Even the most cynical perspective can recognize that the law provides more advantage than disadvantage. The value of predictability alone motivates a self-interested preference for obedience to the loss of security in a lawless society.

When the laws are arranged to systematically disadvantage a group, members of that group will not experience the same sense of protection as members of the privileged group. In such a case breaking the law has no connection with forfeiting security. One who already lacks that security must then evaluate upholding on the basis of expected gains agar mere avoidance of consequences.

In addition, one must always consider two paths: obtaining a benefit within the boundaries of the law or obtaining a benefit outside of those limits. If breaking the law offers a greater benefit or a benefit that one could not obtain through lawful means, breaking the law becomes a pragmatic option. Where obtaining a benefit lawfully is made impossible due to systematic disadvantage stemming from the arrangement or enforcement of the law, the motivation for individuals from disadvantaged groups to obey the law becomes thin.

Where privilege bounds economic success, the ability to secure basic needs will differ across advantaged and disadvantaged identity groups. Members of the advantaged group may look at their peers and elders and reasonably believe that they can secure their living by conforming to expectations. No degree of conformity and obedience protects a systemically disadvantaged group because their group identity alone is nonconforming. Gains can be erased when the advantaged group decide to raid what they perceive as undeserved rewards, as happened at Rosewood and other race riots.

In that light the consequences of property crime become equivocal across legal and illegal acquisition. In either case one’s gains might be taken at a later time. If the illegal path presents a shorter and more certain path than the alternative, property crime becomes a rational choice. Where past injustices disrupt generational wealth for disadvantaged groups, property crime may also serve as a means of reparations, a restoration of unjust takings.

In liberal democracies police officers work to apprehend perpetrators of petty theft or the drug trade while ignoring wage theft undertaken by managers against workers. Unwarranted taking is a criminal matter only when the working class takes from the owner class. Public money pays for police officers to apprehend shoplifters, and members of disadvantaged groups provide ready scapegoats. When the owner class steals from the working class, the only remedy lies in expensive civil courts, giving the owner class the advantage of wealth. Confronted with these asymmetries, members of disadvantaged groups do not enjoy the protection of the law at all. One loses no security by breaking the law if one is unable to rely on its protection.

You take a walk around your block and see a cloud of black smoke. When you find the source, you see flames licking the walls and roof of a house. A window is open on the second floor, and coils of cinder-flecked smoke writhe into the air. Someone is leaning out of the window and calling for help. They want to jump, but need someone to catch them.

No sirens or flashing lights appear to be approaching. The person pleads with you to stand under the window and just try to catch them. They tell you that the door to the room is too hot to touch. Shingles fall off the roof around the window.
What do you do? What should you do? Firefighters appear to be nowhere near. If they are not nearby, the person could pass out from the smoke, unable to jump to safety before the fire truck arrives. No one else is nearby, and all you have to do is stand under the window, break the person’s fall, and help them get away from the burning house.

If it is clear to you that helping the person is the right thing to do, you should be likewise ready to respond to calls for social justice, to investigate systemic bias, and to remedy injustice directly. In Buddhist philosophy the simile of the house of fire demonstrates the motive to help all people achieve liberation. Underlying the simile is an assumption that one is morally required to answer calls for aid, to put oneself at risk to save another in distress.

Social injustice has inflicted physical, psychological, and social damage in all societies. Class warfare is not an imagined future. The present day exploitation and destruction of working people and the world they inhabit is owner class warfare against the working class. Our world is burning, we are buried in debt and desperation, and we are divided and suspicious of one another. We need to heal, not ignore, the diversity of traumas wrought on us by capitalism, by the owner class, by the martial class. Escape for ourselves only is not enough. The house is on fire, and a lot of people need rescue.